Use of gestures to interact with computing devices has become increasingly common. Gesture recognition techniques have successfully enabled gesture interaction with devices when these gestures are made to device surfaces, such as touch screens for phones and tablets and touch pads for desktop computers. Users, however, are more and more often desiring to interact with their devices through gestures not made to a surface, such as a person waving an arm to control a video game. These in-the-air gestures can be sensed using radar techniques by devices that emit a radar field and analyze reflections of that radar field. The device emitting the radar field controls modulation and transmission of the radar field, which enables the device to correlate radar reflections to the modulations of the radar field. In some applications, multiple devices may benefit from radar gesture recognition, but another device, which does not emit the radar field, lacks access to the control information for the modulation and transmission of the radar field to perform radar gesture sensing.